Despandemia: Serious Game in Alternate Reality for Reading and Rewriting Our Intercultural World during the Covid-19 Pandemic

Marcelo A. de Barros, Valéria Andrade, Antão Moura, Laurent Borgmann, Osmundo Claudino

2021

Abstract

The Covid-19 world pandemic and the ensuing closure of schools has resulted in unprecedented emergency remote teaching. In teaching-learning settings in Northeastern Brazil, teachers often face challenges when they try to use innovative pedagogical approaches and introduce innovative technologies to transform students into agents of change in our culturally diverse world through the application of learning. Such challenges were augmented further with the pandemic as the forced systemic use of these technologies was no longer a pedagogical choice but was quickly turned into the general rule for all educators – even those who were not familiar with these technologies. In addition, pandemic traumas such as domestic confinement, social isolation, fear, uncertainty, and anxiety about the future, weakened the emotional health of everyone involved in education by reducing or sometimes even paralyzing the creative processes essential to learning. The result of this new condition was a tangible increase in dropout rates, poor school performance and low self-esteem for teachers and students alike. Home confinement also increased domestic violence, including child abuse and particularly, violence against women. This paper presents a serious game, called Despandemia, for building libraries of interactive gamified books and ubiquitous reading communities. The game is accessible by cell phone and based on the humanistic performative attitude of a teacher-reader in collaborative projects of online socio-cultural entrepreneurship. Despandemia was used and evaluated by 119 students of an “Introduction to Computer Science” course, in which participants considered violence against women as a predominant theme of the pandemic. Results indicate that the game has a positive influence on 1) decreasing course dropout; 2) improving learning performance; and 3) creating connected communities of readers to prevent violence against women.

Paper Citation

in Harvard Style

A. de Barros M., Andrade V., Moura A., Borgmann L. and Claudino O. (2021). Despandemia: Serious Game in Alternate Reality for Reading and Rewriting Our Intercultural World during the Covid-19 Pandemic. In Proceedings of the 13th International Conference on Computer Supported Education - Volume 1: CSEDU, ISBN 978-989-758-502-9, pages 425-436. DOI: 10.5220/0010480804250436

in Bibtex Style

@conference{csedu21,
author={Marcelo A. de Barros and Valéria Andrade and Antão Moura and Laurent Borgmann and Osmundo Claudino},
title={Despandemia: Serious Game in Alternate Reality for Reading and Rewriting Our Intercultural World during the Covid-19 Pandemic},
booktitle={Proceedings of the 13th International Conference on Computer Supported Education - Volume 1: CSEDU,},
year={2021},
pages={425-436},
publisher={SciTePress},
organization={INSTICC},
doi={10.5220/0010480804250436},
isbn={978-989-758-502-9},
}

in EndNote Style

TY - CONF

JO - Proceedings of the 13th International Conference on Computer Supported Education - Volume 1: CSEDU,
TI - Despandemia: Serious Game in Alternate Reality for Reading and Rewriting Our Intercultural World during the Covid-19 Pandemic
SN - 978-989-758-502-9
AU - A. de Barros M.
AU - Andrade V.
AU - Moura A.
AU - Borgmann L.
AU - Claudino O.
PY - 2021
SP - 425
EP - 436
DO - 10.5220/0010480804250436